Cold (3 page)

Scott’s journal records noble behavior and tragedy. By the middle of January 1912, eager to be the first to reach the South
Pole, Scott and the four men who went with him stumbled on sled tracks and camps left by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen,
who had beaten them to the pole by four weeks. Scott’s party pressed on to the pole anyway. “Great God!” Scott wrote, “this
is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.” Disappointed, the men
struggled back toward their base camp.

“Things steadily downhill,” Scott wrote in early March. “Oates’ foot worse. He has rare pluck and must know that he can never
get through. He asked Wilson if he had a chance this morning, and of course Bill had to say he didn’t know. In point of fact
he has none.” Later, Oates, recognizing that he was slowing the party and endangering their lives, talked to his companions.
“I am just going outside and may be some time,” he said. Afterward Scott wrote, “He went out into the blizzard and we have
not seen him since.”

Scott wrote about himself, “My right foot has gone, nearly all the toes — two days ago I was proud possessor of best feet.
These are the steps of my downfall. Like an ass I mixed a small spoonful of curry powder with my melted pemmican — it gave
me violent indigestion. I lay awake and in pain all night; woke and felt done on the march; foot went and I didn’t know it.
A very small measure of neglect and have a foot which is not pleasant to contemplate. Amputation is the least I can hope for
now, but will the trouble spread?”

Later he wrote, “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” And after this, he had but one final entry: “For God’s
sake look after our people.” Scott ended his days eleven impossible miles from a supply depot that would have saved his life.

Frostbite is a common theme among polar explorers. Captain George E. Tyson was marooned with his crew on an Arctic ice floe
in the winter of 1872 and spring of 1873. “The other morning,” he wrote, “Mr. Meyers found that his toes were frozen — no
doubt from his exposure on the ice without shelter the day he was separated from us. He is not very strong at the best, and
his fall in the water has not improved his condition.”

Food, or a lack of food, is another common theme. Roald Amundsen, when he beat Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole, used
sleds pulled by dogs. The dogs doubled as a food supply. Amundsen had this to say about men who pursued their destinies at
the poles: “Often his search is a race with time against starvation.”

Robert Flaherty published the story of Comock, an Inuit. In the narrative, Comock explains how he and his family lived on
Mansel Island in the Canadian Arctic early in the twentieth century. They were on the island alone, isolated for ten years
from their extended families and the villages that dotted the Arctic. They were at times well fed.

“Look at our children,” Comock’s wife said to Comock. “They are warm.”

And Comock, in his narrative, added, “There were little smokes rising from the deerskin robes under which they slept.”

But later, food became scarce. “We shared with our dogs the dog meat upon which we lived,” Comock reported. One of his companions
said that seal meat offered warmth, while dog meat did not. Comock feared the dogs would eat the children.

Frederick Cook, who probably reached or at least came close to the North Pole in April 1908, almost a full year before Robert
E. Peary, ran into trouble and could not return to civilization quickly enough to defend himself against Peary’s own claim
and what has been described as Peary’s slander. Like Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Cook concurred with Dante, but with more drama
and self-aggrandizement: “We all were lifted to the paradise of winners as we stepped over the snows of a destiny for which
we had risked life and willingly suffered the tortures of an ice hell.” But after two days at the pole, he described a feeling
of anticlimax. The pole itself, after all, was just another frozen camp in a frozen landscape. “The intoxication of success
was gone,” he wrote in his memoir. “Hungry, mentally and physically exhausted, a sense of the utter uselessness of this thing,
of the empty reward of my endurance, followed my exhilaration.”

And who has heard of Lieutenant George De Long? In an 1879 attempt to reach the North Pole, De Long and twenty men abandoned
their ship to the ice. They dragged three small boats across the ice for nearly three months before finding open water. One
boat was lost, but two made it to Siberia’s Lena River delta. This was early October. Though suffering from frostbite and
exhaustion, the men were not complainers. De Long wrote, “The doctor resumed the cutting away of poor Ericksen’s toes this
morning. No doubt it will have to continue until half his feet are gone, unless death ensues, or we get to some settlement.
Only one toe left now. Temperature 18º.”

Like Scott, though perhaps with less panache, De Long maintained his journal until the end:

October 17th, Monday. — One hundred and twenty-seventh day. Alexey dying. Doctor baptized him. Read prayers for the sick.
Mr. Collins’ birthday — forty years old. About sunset Alexey died. Exhaustion from starvation.

October 21st, Friday. — One hundred and thirty-first day. Kaack was found dead about midnight between the doctor and myself.
Lee died about noon. Read prayers for the sick when we found he was going.

October 24th, Monday. — One hundred and thirty-fourth day. A hard night.

The next two days contain only the date and the number of days. Then:

October 27th, Thursday. — One hundred and thirty-seventh day. Iversen broken down.

October 28th, Friday. — One hundred and thirty-eighth day. Iversen died during early evening.

October 29th, Saturday. — One hundred and thirty-ninth day. Dressler died during night.

October 30th, Sunday. — One hundred and fortieth day. Boyd and Gortz died during night. Mr. Collins dying.

The bodies of De Long and nine others were recovered the following spring.

It is July twenty-sixth and sunny. The mercury rises to fifty-two degrees here on Narwhal Island, ten miles north of Alaska’s
North Slope. Nothing but water and ice separates me from the North Pole. I have, for the past hour, been taking my jacket
off and putting it back on. Each time I take it off, a breeze comes in from the north, from the pack ice, like the draft from
an open freezer door. Each time I don my jacket, the door closes and the breeze stops. I watch the ice flow past, a regatta
of white and blue abstract sculptures. One could not quite step from one chunk of ice to the next without swimming, but boating
just now would be a challenge. Here is an ice chunk the size of a suitcase, there one the size of a small house, several in
a row the size of compact cars. The breeze comes from the north, but the ice moves to the west, propelled by currents, the
bulk of each chunk hanging underwater like an aquatic sail.

Occasionally, a chunk of ice strands next to the shore, hard aground. Another chunk butts up against the first. They grind.
Water drips from their tops continuously. Pieces of ice break off, dropping into the Beaufort Sea with splashes that sound
remarkably similar to those produced by bass jumping in a still pond. I wade into the sea, break off a piece of ice, and pop
it into my mouth. It tastes as fresh as springwater. The molecules in ice are packed in an orderly fashion, forming crystals.
There is little space between the molecules for salt ions.

Farther out, between here and the horizon, the ice is more densely packed and in places continuous. Fog banks hover over the
ice like plumes of smoke. Occasionally, maybe once each half hour, the pack ice cracks under the pressure of movement, of
collisions, of one body striking another. The cracking sounds like distant cannon fire.

The beach I stand on is a mix of gravel and sand. It looks as though someone has worked it over with a bulldozer. The ice,
in places, has plowed the sand into piles, left deep gouge marks on the shore, or dumped moraines of gravel above the tide
line. Although I am on the island’s northern shore, I can turn and see across the island to the other side, and beyond that
the mainland, peppered with oil field facilities. A collapsed wooden shack stands on the island, the remains of a long-forgotten
scientific party. A large red buoy stranded near the middle of the island speaks of storm tides or ice overrunning the land.
Wandering the island, I see only two species of plants clinging to life in scattered patches. Driftwood has accumulated in
bigger patches. The rest seems to be bare sand and gravel.

An arctic tern screams at me, then swoops in, obviously protecting a nest. After four or five swoops, it connects with my
hat. It leaves me no choice but to find the nest. I look for a small depression in the sand. The closer I get, the more agitated
the bird becomes. It dives closer and closer, screaming “Warmer, warmer, warmer.” It backs off a bit, telling me “Colder,
colder,” and I change direction. I move slowly, taking a careful step, scanning the ground in front of me, then taking another
careful step. It swoops at me from behind, but I can see its shadow coming. As I get warmer, the tern gets more aggressive.
I duck as its shadow closes in. And there is the nest. This late in the year, the tern has but a single egg to protect. Two
feet away, a long-dead chick, its body stiff and its eyes glazed, lies on the sand. I back off, ashamed to have disturbed
the nesting tern and its lone surviving egg.

Common eiders nest here, too, in bowls scraped from the sand along the edges of driftwood piles. Their nest bowls are much
bigger than those of terns, and they are lined with down — eiderdown, as it turns out, plucked from the breasts of females
and prized as the best of down, soft and warm and far better than that of domestic ducks. Most of the eider nests are empty,
but a few still hold as many as five pale green eggs, somewhat larger than chicken eggs.

For both the eiders and the terns, these may be second or third nest attempts. It seems late in the year to start a family.
By September, the eiders will head for open water, where they overwinter, swimming and feeding. The terns, winter averse,
will fly twelve thousand miles to Antarctica and then return next spring. During its life, a tern will travel a distance equivalent
to that of a round-trip to the moon.

I migrate back to the island’s northern shore, scanning the ice through my binoculars. I hope to see a polar bear or at least
a seal, but all I see is ice and water. Despite the island’s name, no narwhals frolic here today. Narwhals, with their long
tusks, live beneath the ice, coming up to breathe in open leads and holes, and moving toward coastal areas in summer. They
are common in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic, well to the east. The rare straggler finds its way to Alaska, but I have
not seen one in these waters in the five years I have been coming here. The island, someone tells me later, was named for
a nineteenth-century whaling ship rather than the narwhal itself.

The seals, the polar bears, and the narwhals mock me, like woolly bear caterpillars, here yet not here, here yet nowhere to
be seen.

Adolphus Greely, then a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, led his twenty-five men north in the summer of 1881. They made it past
eighty-three degrees, some four hundred miles south of the pole, then turned around. The relief ship intended to pick them
up could not pass through the ice. A second relief ship sank. The men froze and starved in the far north.

Before it was over, Greely’s men experienced an intense aloneness and ate caterpillars. They also ate leather shoelaces. Sealskin
lashings became stew. Sleeping bag covers in the nineteenth century were oiled to render them waterproof, and well boiled,
the covers were rendered into broth. The men found crumbs of bread as the snow melted around their camp. They lamented the
absence of plants and lichens that in other times would not have been considered fit for consumption. They ate hundreds of
pounds of amphipods — sea fleas — using, among other things, the remains of dead comrades as bait. One man ate bird droppings,
apparently convinced that undigested seeds that passed through birds’ guts would provide sustenance. The men divided the soles
of an old pair of boots. Later, there would be accusations of cannibalism.